I recently participated in a discussion with some LIS students who more often than I’d prefer said they avoided library association chapter and conference meetings and events because they felt shy (often mistakenly referred to as introverted) and felt stressed or worried about interactions. Besides being a ‘bad’ career move, it’s also limiting on most personal and developmental levels. So here’s a couple of links and videos that might help.

Anyone who has met me knows that I am pretty extroverted, but I still get hintjs from these videos. Even I feels a little stressed and uncomfortable when entering new situations with many people or audiences I don’t know. It tooks a lot of my early career to recognize that our profession is pretty nice and welcoming.

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About The Author

Stephen Abram is a librarian and principal with Lighthouse Consulting Inc., and executive director of the Federation of Ontario Public Libraries. He blogs on library strategies for direction, marketing, technology and user alignment.